Garden made of paper daisies

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Julie Millowick was moved to "create a garden" for former
Australian prime minister's wife, Hazel Hawke.Photo: Supplied

An artist makes pictures with no camera or film, writes
Louise Bellamy.

American photojournalist Eddie Adams' image of Saigon police
chief, General Loan, executing an unarmed civilian at point blank
range in 1968 spearheaded the first rumblings of the anti-Vietnam
war campaign. It also persuaded Australian photographer Julie
Millowick, a secretary at the time, to change her life.

The drover's daughter from South Australia, who had left school
at 16 and had been working at the Australian Embassy in Washington
DC, packed her bags and moved to Melbourne to study photography at
Victoria College, Prahran.

More than 30 years on, Millowick, 57, is holding her 24th solo
show and has been lecturer in photography and photojournalism at La
Trobe's Bendigo campus for close to two decades. Her most recent
works are exhibited as A Garden For Hazel. Millowick
explains that she was moved to "create a garden" for former
Australian prime minister's wife, Hazel Hawke, following a
television show documenting Hawke's life as an Alzheimer's disease
sufferer during which she said she loved gardening.

Millowick's exhibition incorporates ferns, poppies and native
grasses gathered from her property in Fryerstown near Castlemaine,
which she recreates through cyanotypes. This form of image making,
requiring no camera or film, involves placing transparent objects
onto paper painted with potassium ferricyanide and ammonia ferric
after it's dried and then exposing them to ultraviolet light which
creates rich Prussian blue and white images.

Some cyanotypes in the show are accompanied by text - contrived
emails to the artist's real-life sister which aim to explore her
relationship with her mother and sister.

Other transparent objects in the show incorporate silk and
nylon, including a three-metre- long cyanotype of baby clothing on
a washing line with text referring to a recent conversation
Millowick had with her mother about "good drying weather".

There's nothing I loved more than doing a shoot of a semi and its driver all lit up at two in the morning.

Box leaves and bougainvillea are also recreated through the
photogram process which, like the cyanotypes, requires no
photographic equipment, but evolves from placing objects onto
photographic paper in the darkroom and exposing them to light to
create sepia tones.

Millowick's work has not been confined to botanical references.
She once worked as a corporate industrial photographer, which she
relished "because it involved light, the light of lots and lots of
trucks, containers, factories and people, always people".

"There's nothing I loved more than doing a shoot of an enormous
semi and its driver all lit up at two in the morning - that was the
thrill of corporate photography."

Later she started integrating text with photography, a move
inspired by the death of a close a friend from a cerebral
hemorrhage. A show called Intimate Lives, based on responses
to her grief, toured Britain.

In 1994, following a severe back injury, which damaged her
central nervous system and reduced her to 40 kilograms and confined
her to bed for two years, everything - including her subject matter
- changed. No longer able to dress herself, let alone hold a
camera, it was during the two fragmented hours she was able to move
about each day that she started experimenting with cyanotypes and
photograms.

An earlier show at Span Galleries in 2000, in which Millowick's
research her to an early definition of "paraphernalia" -"those
articles of personal property which the law allowed a married woman
to keep and deal with as her own, when most of her personal or
movable property was vested in her husband" - inspired her
application of laces and gauzes to the cyanotype process to create
images which "constituted a woman's own property".

Later, in 2003, in A Year In Our Lives at Bendigo
Regional Art Gallery, Millowick documented the profound influence
Englishwoman, Anna Atkins, one of the world's forerunners in the
cyanotype process, had on her life. A photograph of Atkins appears
with the text: "There is one surviving portrait of you Anna, taken
in 1861 when you were 62 years old. Heavens - those clothes! How
did you manage even the simplest of day-to-day tasks, let alone
being up to your elbows in cyanotype chemistry?"